Langston Hughes

Highlights from the Archives

The University of Missouri Press is placing a claim on its native son by publishing for the first time the complete ''Collected Works of Langston Hughes'' in 18 volumes. The first three volumes were published in June. The entire set will be available in time for the centenary of his birth, Feb. 1, 2002.

In December 1934, the poet Langston Hughes went to Mexico City to wrap up the business affairs of his late father, James, only to discover that he had been disinherited. Father and son had had a difficult relationship.

“Selected Letters of Langston Hughes” traces the writer’s career from the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s through the arrival into the American consciousness of black nationalist firebrands in the 1960s.